@evan I just read your blog post, where it says "One thing I learned is that Mozilla is working on an MLS implementation in the browser".
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@evan I just read your blog post, where it says "One thing I learned is that Mozilla is working on an MLS implementation in the browser". Did they/you mean that as they're working on a Web API for MLS, which they want to implement in Firefox first?
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@raucao yes, that's what I heard, but I don't have a link to info on it. I believe the idea is to build the MLS algorithms into Firefox, and then apps can connect them to their own transports. It's a cool model. There was some concern by others in the browser space that there's not a clear difference between this approach and just having a common, high-quality MLS JS library.
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@evan Thanks! Yeah, it seems to me like a high-quality library would solve the same problem, and we'd have to polyfill one anyway, for browsers that don't support MLS primitives natively yet. In the long run, it could increase performance by not having to download that code, of course.
I asked, because I had just looked into the library situation a couple of days ago, and it seems like there's nothing available in TS/JS at the moment:
Râu Cao ⚡ (@[email protected])
Is anyone aware of any #TypeScript or #JavaScript implementation of MLS other than this seemingly abandoned one by the Matrix Foundation? https://gitlab.matrix.org/matrix-org/mls-ts Or do we just use a maintained Rust implementation like OpenMLS via WebAssembly?
kosmos.social (kosmos.social)
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@raucao so, is MLS over AP an interesting problem to you? Would you like to work on the task force for it?
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@evan Yes and no. The mid- to long-term plan is to add private group chats to a Web chat client of ours. So I'm a bit more interested in MLS over XMPP, and I'm following work for MLS over Nostr, which are both good bases for private group messaging, because users of those protocols already have key pairs and encryption for 1:1 chats in place. Also, the client currently only does XMPP and IRC.
But I want to follow the AP work on it, too, because it could be added to the same chat client as well.
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@evan Ultimately, it would be amazing if they could all be made interoperable, of course, but I doubt that everyone will ever agree on the same algos and other details. But still, everyone would need the same MLS primitive functions for their Web clients, so that's why the library/API question is interesting to me.
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@raucao I think bridging would be interesting -- being able to do E2EE messaging without decrypting at the bridge point.
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@evan That would be the ideal scenario, because it would allow private DMs across protocols.
Nobody has it implemented for any decentralized protocol yet, so if we don't all ignore each other's work, we might actually be able to make that happen somehow. However, I'm still not very hopeful that everyone can agree on the details. But surely we can try at least.
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@raucao Honestly there are like 3+ projects just over ActivityPub right now. We need to coalesce. But it'd be good to keep the conversation going. I think integrating into browsers would be great.